They did it again. First, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Nov. 5, “As a conservative democrat party, we have the responsibility to provide security to all the children in this country belonging to mothers, fathers, and their relatives. We do not allow boys and girls to stay together in public dormitories, and we won’t allow it to happen.” When those remarks received significant backlash, Muammer Guler, the interior minister, felt the need to provide explanation, which only made things worse. He argued that the prime minister did not intend to express concern about the boys-and-girls risk of sharing some sexual appeal under the same roof, but that they worried that these kinds of coed accommodation made it a recruitment ground for terrorist organizations.

“In our studies regarding terrorism, one of the key findings is that the terrorist organizations have started to significantly abuse the relationships between the boys and girls, those among the university youth. They use it as a recruitment base to their organizations,” Guler said on Nov. 6. “In the latest operation, 31 out of 85 arrested were females. We have seen the terrorist organizations using the youth for their own purposes. This is the terror aspect of the issue. It’s not about people legally being together or those being together in the student homes, but it is a fact that these children have been targets of terrorist organizations. The families have a right to know where their kids are. The state has a responsibility to protect the youth, and therefore take protective measures. This is the terror aspect of this matter.”

Society can only lose its peace of mind and endanger its real security if the politicians continue to use terms like “terrorist” or “terrorism” out of context for domestic consumption — as is happening in this incident. As much as it was wrong to generalize and package all the Gezi Park protesters as “terrorists” or members of “terrorist organizations,” Guler’s approach to this matter was equally and perhaps more unjustified. His position presents nothing beyond the state considering its university youth as potential terrorists. And that can only backfire, and lay the ground for bigger problems. Many university students have already started to express their dismay, at the very least, at this schoolboyish government rhetoric insulting their dignity.

Moreover, this trend also paints a very problematic picture for Turkey. If one were a foreigner in Turkey and had never been here before, for example, that individual might easily conclude that this was a land where terrorist organizations dominated, as if one out of every two people were a terrorist.